by David Plotz
Ruth and Boaz have a son, whom they name Obed. He grows up to be the father of Jesse, who is in turn the father of King David. (Ruth, thus, is also an ancestor of Jesus, since he is descended from David.)
And that’s it. That’s the whole story. No smiting. No prophecies. No laws. No kings. No God. Just the story of one family and its two good women.
I had never read Ruth, so going into the story I didn’t understand the fierce loyalty it inspired. But I do now. Like the Song of Songs, Ruth is very different from everything that precedes it. For starters, it’s inspiring for observant Jewish readers because it shows biblical laws in action. We see how a nice family follows the Bible’s (peculiar) rules about gleaning and levirate marriage and thrives as a result. The law is no longer an abstraction; it’s alive, and it’s good.
What’s even more important and unusual about Ruth, and the reason why so many Christians and nonobservant Jews love it, is its domesticity. Ruth reminds me of nothing so much as a Jane Austen novel, compressing the whole world into the intimate details of family life. Grand national and religious politics are absent. Ruth revels in the small moments where love is forged. It holds out the prospect of redemption, but in the smallest, most personal way—for the young foreign widow, for the kind mother-in-law, for the lonely old bachelor. Ruth is the quietest of all Bible books, a short story that manages to combine extraordinary power and extraordinary serenity. Like an old country song, it leaves me feeling calm, joyful, inspired, and also a little bit melancholy—sad that the world can’t always be so sweet.
TWENT Y- TWO
The Books of Lamentations and Ecclesiastes
Bible Books for Rock Stars
In which Jerusalem’s destruction is remembered again; a teacher wonders what the point of life is, since we all die anyway, then advises us to enjoy every day, since you can’t take it with you.
the book of lamentations
s you might surmise from the name, Lamentations is not the cheeriest read. It begins “Alas,” and goes downhill from there. Its five poetic chapters address the destruction of Jerusalem and the misery of the Jews. The first one, written in the voice of the Israelites, admits that God “is in the right” to punish Jerusalem, but it mourns because the enemy has conquered and humiliated the city. The lamenter tries to look on the bright side, begging the Lord to make Israel’s enemies as miserable as the Israelites. Sometimes the Bible denounces schadenfreude, and sometimes that’s the only item on the menu.
Lamentations is tossed way in the back of the Hebrew Bible, but it really belongs with the prophets, since it addresses the same depressing themes as they do: destruction, exile, God’s disappointment with us.
the book of ecclesiastes
Chapters 1–2
Ecclesiastes, like Deuteronomy, has a name that is at once familiar and nonsensical. Goodness knows I have heard “Ecclesiastes” a million times, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what the word means. So, I Googled and learned that it’s the Greek for “preacher,” in turn a translation of the Hebrew goheleth or koheleth.
In the first sentence, Ecclesiastes announces that the book is “the words of Koheleth son of David, king in Jerusalem.” This immediately sets wheels spinning, since the only son of David who became king is Solomon. Does that make Koheleth Solomon? One current theory is that Ecclesiastes was actually written hundreds of years after the time of Solomon, and was attributed to Koheleth in order to give it street cred. But other translations simply call him the Teacher or the Preacher.
In any case, Koheleth is a thoughtful, weary fellow, trying to come to grips with the fact that wealth, power, and wisdom don’t seem to matter. In the end, we all make a meal for worms. The book mixes the contemplative, self-help style of Proverbs with a shrugging, though not cheerless, fatalism.
The second verse of the book is one of the most famous in the Bible, at least as the King James Version translates it: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” My translation renders it “Utter futility! All is futile!,” which, I think, better captures the tone of the book. The King James Version suggests that Ecclesiastes is a hectoring book, but actually it’s a hopeless one.
Koheleth’s big question is: what does a man gain from all his work, prosperity, and success “under the sun”? The key phrase, which appears probably thirty times in the book, is “under the sun.” Koheleth is interested in the here and now. “Under the sun” suggests brightness, joy, youth. He is seeking to sum up life at its best. How does it hold up?
Not well, apparently. Koheleth immediately concludes that generation after generation lives on Earth, but nothing ever changes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Koheleth studies wisdom, and realizes that it’s pointless, because the wiser you are, the more heartache you suffer. He examines merriment—that’s pointless as well. He builds houses, plants vineyards, buys slaves and cattle, amasses gold and silver. He gets nothing out of it except a little plea sure. It’s futile, of “no real value under the sun!” At first he thinks the wise man is better than the fool, but then he realizes there is no difference, because “the same fate awaits them both.” He decides that he loathes life because “all is futile, and pursuit of wind.” Pretty bleak, eh?
Eventually, he decides to embrace a kind of nihilistic hedonism. If life is pointless, you might as well enjoy it. So eat, drink, be merry!
Chapter 3
Another of the most famous passages in the Bible—“there’s a time for everything.” (Ecclesiastes is, verse for verse, the most quoted book in the Bible.) There’s “a time for being born, and a time for dying, a time for planting, and a time for uprooting the planted . . . a time for loving and a time for hating; a time for war and a time for peace.” And a bunch more times, as well. If you’re like me, you know this best as the Byrds’ cover of a song by Pete Seeger. Modern readers view this passage as soothing: Ah, look, the whole world fits together. There is a time for everything. Cool. But Koheleth reaches a gloomier conclusion: If it’s all put together by God, all planned out in this way, then what purpose is life? If the fix is in, we might as well just “eat and drink and get enjoyment.” This is another case of the messy Bible being cleaned up.
Chapter 4
This chapter contains the Bible’s finest tribute to family and love. Koheleth begins by deploring the “solitary individuals,” who spend all their time working but have no one to share their wealth with. This flows into the following glorious passage:
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two
lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?
Chapters 5–6
Koheleth concludes that wealth and greed bring only dissatisfaction. “A lover of money never has his fill of money.” It’s also pointless to love money, because you can’t take it with you. Ripping off Job—or being ripped off by Job—he declares: “As he came out of his mother’s womb, so must he depart at last, naked as he came.” (Job 1 says: “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there.”)
Chapter 9
I now understand why Ecclesiastes is the favorite book of the Bible among people who don’t strongly believe in God. It offers the only genuine competition to the Bible’s main theme of heaven, redemption, and judgment. If you believe in God, you can explain injustice and wickedness on earth with Judgment Day, when the good get their just deserts. But what if you don’t believe? What if death is just death? What if there is no afterlife, no second chance? How do we live then? Ecclesiastes faces this head-on. Koheleth believes that you die and that’s it—“even a live dog is better than a dead lion . . . the dead know nothing . . . their loves, their hates, their jealousies have long since perished.” Koheleth’s answer is: seize the day. “Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might.” “Enjoy happiness with a woman you love.” This is all we get, so
make the most of it.
I am not criticizing one bit when I say that this is a godless philosophy. It is literally a way to live well without God. So, it raises an obvious question: what on Earth is it doing in the Bible? Why did the rabbis and bishops keep Ecclesiastes all these thousands of years? I can think of a couple of reasons. First, there may be a powerful agnostic strain in the Judeo-Christian tradition—hey, that’s certainly my strain—and Ecclesiastes is a way to speak to this crowd, a way to acknowledge their doubts but keep them in the fold. (A few weeks ago, an evangelical Christian friend told me that Ecclesiastes is his favorite book of the Bible. This makes me like him even more, but I wonder if his pastor should worry about him.) Second, maybe Ecclesiastes was kept in the Bible precisely because it’s so provocative. It riles people up, it makes them think, and thinking may make them more active in their faith.
Chapter 12
The last chapter is a beauty. Returning to our key lesson—repeat after me, class, Enjoy your days under the sun, because they are brief— Koheleth delivers a poetic montage, a list of people, places, and things coming to their end. It has a relentless, gorgeous rhythm. It sounds exactly like a Bob Dylan song:
When the guards of the house become shaky,
And the men of valor are bent,
And the maids that grind, grown few, are idle,
And the ladies that peer through the windows grow dim,
And the doors to the street are shut—
With the noise of the hand mill growing fainter,
And the song of the bird growing feebler,
And all the strains of music dying down;
When one is afraid of heights
And there is terror in the road . . .
Before the silver cord snaps
And the golden bowl crashes,
The jar is shattered at the spring,
And the jug is smashed at the cistern.
And the dust returns to the ground,
As it was.
So live now! Live now, before it’s too late!
That should be the end of Ecclesiastes, but it’s not. There’s a hilariously misplaced coda, seemingly tacked on by another author trying to make the book more palatable. It declares: “The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe His commandments. . . . God will call every creature to account for everything unknown, be it good or bad.”
Uh, dude, did you read the rest of the book? That’s exactly what it doesn’t say.
TWENT Y- THREE
The Book of Esther
The First Miss Universe Pageant
In which the King of Persia divorces his wife, holds a beauty pageant, and marries the winner, a nice Jewish girl named Esther; her uncle saves the king’s life; the new prime minister, Haman, hates Jews and orders their extermination; Esther and her uncle discover the plan and persuade the king that it’s a bad idea; Haman is executed, his supporters are crushed, and the Jewish victory is celebrated with the holiday Purim.
chapter 1
sther is one of the best stories in the Bible, but not because it teaches moral lessons, reveals human goodness, or glorifies the Lord. It’s short on all three counts. Instead, it’s a great story because it’s got sex, subterfuge, violence, revenge, and four main characters straight out of Shakespeare.
We begin with a jerk. Not merely a jerk, but a vain, egomaniacal, fickle, childish cad. Ahasuerus is emperor of, well, everywhere. Based in Persia, he rules 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia. Notably for our purposes, he rules the Jews, who have been liberated from their Babylonian oppressors and now live throughout the Persian empire.
Soon after he inherits the throne, Ahasuerus decides to hold a six-month party in his capital, Shushan. The final week of Ahasuerus’s party is a banquet, where, as during Mardi Gras and at the Sigma Chi house, “the rule for drinking was, ‘no restrictions.’ ” On the seventh day of the feast, the soused king orders his queen, Vashti, to come and “display her beauty to the partygoers.”
What does “display her beauty” mean, you ask? Good question. I don’t know. Does he want her merely to be admired from afar? Or lasciviously ogled? Or does he actually expect her to strip for them? It’s not clear, and we never learn the answer, because Vashti bravely refuses. Ahasuerus flips out. His ministers tell him that Vashti has not merely insulted her hubby but committed a crime against the empire, because now all women will think it’s OK to disobey their husbands, and what a mess that will be. “There will be no end of scorn and provocation!”
Egged on by the prime minister, the king orders Vashti banished from his presence. He concludes, hilariously, that their divorce will improve marriages nationwide: From now on, “all wives will treat their husbands with respect.” So ends our setup, one of the most entertaining chapters in the whole Good Book.
chapter 2
Playing the role of royal pimps, Ahasuerus’s ministers assemble all the beautiful young virgins in the empire, placing them under the care of the emperor’s top eunuch. (This episode includes a fabulous line, one that reminds us just how little has changed in 2,500 years. The ministers instruct the eunuch to treat the girls right: “Let them be provided with their cosmetics.”) When the virgins arrive at the harem, they don’t go immediately to Ahasuerus’s bed. Rather, they prepare for an entire year: “Six months with oil of myrrh and six months with perfumes and women’s cosmetics.”
It’s the first Miss Universe pageant, complete with a tiara for the winner. (Plus one sleazy Persian monarch in the role of Donald Trump.)
And your new Miss Universe, 483 BC, is—Miss Shushan, Esther Cohen! Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that Esther turns out to be the most stunning girl in the empire. Not to reveal my biases, but have you seen how great-looking the Jewish women of that region are? Readers, I married one.
The emperor makes Esther his queen. A Jewish orphan, Esther had been adopted by her elderly cousin Mordecai. At Mordecai’s urging, Esther “passes,” not revealing herself as a Jew to her husband.
Loitering outside the palace gates one day, Mordecai overhears two eunuchs plotting to assassinate Ahasuerus. (And who can blame them? If someone made you a eunuch, wouldn’t you want some payback?) He tells Esther, who reports it to her husband, who has the plotters impaled on stakes.
chapter 3
The king appoints a new prime minister, Haman. (Boo! Hiss!) Everyone else in the court bows to Haman, but Mordecai refuses. The text doesn’t say this, but I assume that Mordecai won’t bow because Jews are supposed to bow only to God. Is that right? (Question: If that is the case, how does Mordecai get away with not bowing to the king?) The detestable Haman is “filled with rage” at Mordecai and plots to annihilate all the Jews in the empire. Haman casts lots to determine the date of the massacre. (“Lots” is purim in Hebrew; this is why the holiday inspired by Esther is called Purim.) Now Haman needs to get the king on his side. Haman tells Ahasuerus that the empire is filled with Jews who don’t obey the king’s laws but follow their own laws instead. The king mustn’t tolerate such dissent.
What’s curious is that Haman is half right. From Persia to Spain to the United States, we Jews have always set ourselves apart from the societies in which we live, following our own customs and laws (though also the laws of the host nation). That separation has allowed Jews to maintain their faith and culture through 2,500 years of diaspora. The question, of course, is what conclusion you should draw from the separation. In many places, wise rulers decided that Jewish separation posed no danger, because Jews contributed so much to the nation. But in other places, rulers exploited Jewish separateness as a threat and an opportunity. Jews could be scapegoated and attacked, and their difference was considered a menace to what should be a homogeneous society. (See Spain during the Inquisition, or Nazi Germany.) So the story of Esther is also a lesson in the virtue of diversity.
The king, an easily led fool, listens to Haman for about fi fteen seconds and agrees that extermination of the Jews is a great idea. (Then,
presumably, he immediately goes back to what really interests him— playing video golf or fondling the latest batch of virgins.)
Haman dispatches an order across the empire, under the king’s signature, to “destroy, massacre, and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women, on a single day.” Those three verbs—“destroy, massacre, and exterminate”—are very powerful, emphasizing the existential menace of Haman. Remember that at this time there were no Jews anywhere else in the world. If you wiped out the Jews in the Persian empire, you wiped them out, period. It’s not hyperbole to compare Hitler to Haman or Haman to Hitler.
Here’s a fascinating verse. When the decree is announced in Shushan, the king and Haman sit down for a celebratory dinner, but “the city of Shushan [is] dumfounded.” Presumably, this is because Shushan itself has a huge Jewish population. It must be the New York of Persia.
chapters 4–6
Jews grieve over their impending destruction, slated for the thirteenth day of the month of Adar. But they don’t revolt. Why?
Mordecai asks Esther to intercede with the king. She quavers. She tells Mordecai that Ahasuerus has not seen her in a month, and she can’t go to him on her own, because the penalty for seeing the king without having been summoned is death. Mordecai tells her she’s going to die anyway if Haman isn’t stopped—her position won’t protect her—so she must petition Ahasuerus. She asks the Jews of Shushan to fast on her behalf, then agrees to take her life in her hands and visit the king unbidden. (Note the parallel between Vashti and Esther. Vashti risks her life by refusing to go to the king when summoned. Esther risks hers by going to the king when she has not been summoned.)